Never Alone, page 32
Part Five
Coming Home to Me
71
A Delicate Flower
Even through my heartbreak, it doesn’t take long for my awe and wonder at the incredible landscape spread out before me to eclipse my sorrow. On launch day, the view from the helicopter was beautiful and fascinating, but didn’t mean much to me. Now that I know this place so intimately, the bird’s eye view of it is overwhelming. Every rock, every trail, and every stretch of shore has stories attached to it. Seeing so much of it all at once, and my own little peninsula in the context of the larger world that envelopes it, is breathtaking, and helps me find some peace with the transition. Then we bank and head the other direction, with vast water and unknown territory in front of us.
Long before I’m ready for it, I can see something different up ahead—straight lines and right angles and other shapes that don’t make sense against the forest and water. The helicopter starts to descend, and I can see a cluster of buildings—the production base camp—on the ground below.
There’s a crew there waiting for us. After we land, people begin grabbing my bags and someone holds my arm and steadies me as I crouch-walk out from under the spinning blades. On the far side of the landing pad, they’ve set up a chair for me to wait in. The first priority is to have the doctor see me, and they’re still readying a room for him to use for the examination.
It feels like a lot of fuss, and I’m confused about why everyone is treating me like such a delicate flower. While I’m grateful for the care, I’m also a little frustrated. I’ve just spent months taking care of myself in the arctic wilds—haven’t I demonstrated that I’m anything but delicate? As the helicopter powers down and the excitement and the adrenaline start to wear off, though, I realize that I’m pretty tired and cold, and even a little shaky, and soon I’m glad for the chair and the blanket they bring me.
It’s hot and stuffy when I step into the exam room. Oh my god, a heated room! I’d almost forgotten there were such things. The doctor is kind and attentive and puts me at ease.
“I need to check your weight and vitals,” he explains. “To make sure you’re fit for the plane ride to the hospital.”
Hospital? I’m going to the hospital?
I strip down to the same long underwear I’ve worn for all my med checks and step onto the scale. I haven’t been allowed to look at it and see my own weight since the first medical check. Reading the numbers now, I think there must be some mistake. I haven’t weighed less than a hundred pounds since I was twelve. I sink onto the bed and wrap my arms around my shoulders. Even in the stifling heat of the room, I’m shivering.
It’s not a mistake. I’ve lost fifty pounds since launch. Fifty. And I’m only five feet four. That is a tremendous percentage of my body weight. An entire third of me is gone, putting me squarely in the bmi danger zone.
“We’ve been very concerned about you,” the doctor explains. “I’m glad you made the call, but you were going to be heading out today either way. With your level of weight loss, though, we need to run some blood panels on you before we can begin the refeeding protocols.”
Refeeding protocols? What the heck does that mean?
Returning to regular eating after the level of starvation I experienced, he explains, can be dangerous—even deadly. Refeeding is the process of slowly and carefully getting the body and digestive system used to eating again and giving it time to adjust to the kinds of food it hasn’t processed for some time.
I thought I was coming out to the birthday dinner I’ve been fantasizing about. A plane ride to the hospital is not what I had in mind.
“Can I shower first?” I ask. Now that I’m around “normal” people again, I’m acutely aware of how filthy I am. He looks at his watch. “You’ve got about half an hour. The plane has to take off soon to make it to Yellowknife before dark.”
So much for relaxing in the luxury of being clean and well fed. There’s someone in a small utility vehicle waiting for me outside, with my clothes bag from prelaunch in the back. They won’t even let me walk to the bathhouse by myself, even though I was hiking my own trapline right up until yesterday. Now that I really understand the depth of my weight loss, though, I don’t argue with them.
This fishing lodge was built for summer, not deep northern winter, so the pipes to every outbuilding but one small bath house are shut off. I step inside and go through my bag to grab something clean for the flight. My prelaunch clothes are like foreign objects to me, but I’m thrilled to have something to wear that isn’t covered in soot and reeking of smoke. Someone hands me a clean towel and, with a reminder that the clock is ticking, I’m left on my own.
I strip down to my long underwear, then straighten up, and that’s when I see my face in the mirror for the first time.
Oh. My. God.
Now I get why everyone is treating me like fine china that could break at any second. If I didn’t know I was the only one in this room, I wouldn’t believe it’s my own face looking back at me. My cheeks are sunken and my eyes are huge and bulging. My head looks enormous on my spindly frame, and even through my long johns, I can see how my knobby knees and elbows jut out from my stick-like limbs. My face and hands are so blackened with greasy soot—and snot, and blood, and god knows what else—that I look like I’m wearing dark gloves. With my gray skin, oversized head, and strange eyes, I look like a B-movie alien that has been tossed into a bag of charcoal and shaken up. When I run my fingers along my prominent cheekbones, I see my hands in the mirror, and the reflection shows the deep, bloody cracks all over them.
There’s a sick fascination in it, but it’s incredibly disorienting to see myself this way, so I decide it’s best to absorb the sight in small doses. Besides, I’ve probably got only twenty minutes left to scrub months’ worth of filth away. I tear myself away from the mirror and climb into the shower.
It takes three shampoos before the water runs clear, even with hair that feels half as thick as it used to. Though I scrub my body all over and the dark water pours off me, my skin seems to be permanently stained gray. It will probably have to slough off before I’m my normal color again.
All I want to do is lean my head against the wall and melt into the blissfully warm water, the first physical comfort I’ve had in so long, but I don’t have time for anything but the necessities.
I towel off quickly and shrug into a bra and underwear. The underwear dangles limply, like it’s been doing for weeks, but the bra is far stranger. The molded cups stand away from my chest, and there’s three inches of air space between them and my shrunken breasts. It’s the only clean bra I’ve got, and I’m not going to the hospital without one, so even though I feel like a toddler playing dress up, I toss my long johns and sweater on and wear it like that. I’m floating in my jeans too, and don’t have enough holes in my old belt to fit it to my current waist, so I tie some of the belt loops together with stray yarn I find in the bag and head out the door.
The plane ride to Yellowknife is a blur. Compared to the intensity of feelings from this morning, I feel surprisingly numb now. It’s largely the shock, I’m guessing, or perhaps my wasted body had enough energy for only a certain amount of emotion today and used it all up in one go. I want to look out the plane windows and take in more of the forest and lake below, but I don’t have it in me. My exhaustion catches up with me five minutes after takeoff, and I spend most of the flight slumped onto the shoulder of the medic, Ben.
I fantasized about celebrating this historic day with a juicy, rare burger and a group of people. What I get instead is a thermos of bone broth and nearly eight hours under the fluorescent lights of the waiting room until they finally call me in. Ben will always be my personal savior for letting me sleep on his lap for at least half of those hours.
My bloodwork and electrolyte levels look good (thank you, salt buttons). I’m not deemed to be in danger, but it’s after midnight by the time I’m tucked into a hotel room in town and left blessedly alone again, with more sensory stimulation to process than I’ve had in weeks on end.
The electric lights and forced air heat at the hotel are disorienting but, I have to admit, absolutely dreamy. And that isn’t all. I have a bathtub. Have you seen these things? They are amazing. A basin bigger than my whole body, that I can fill with hot water—without having to chip through ice for it, haul it, or make a fire to heat it. A dream come true.
But I can’t get comfortable. Even in water, the protruding bones in my hips, butt, and shoulders rub uncomfortably against the hard porcelain. I can’t relax and enjoy it until I heap towels into the tub to make a padded nest for myself. For the first two hours, I just lie there, listening to the drumming of my heartbeat in my ears. I dry off with the one small hand towel I didn’t use to pad the tub and then crawl into bed. But though I lie there for over an hour, my brain won’t shut down. Eventually, I draw another bath, grab the pen and hotel notepad from the desk, and sit upright in the tub, the notepad balanced on its edge. I scribble snapshot memories of my wilderness life on the front and back of every page until the notepad is filled and the sun is rising.
I would later learn that almost no one sleeps their first night back, so the few hours I got in the er waiting room should be considered a solid victory.
72
Deciding I Am Beautiful
My Yellowknife support team consists of two people: Ben, the medic, and Jessie, who is in charge of my care and feeding.
My skin is so cracked and dry that I beg Jessie to take me somewhere to get lotions and salves, plus a real notebook to write in, so we go to a local bookstore and then a drugstore. The bookstore is wonderful, but the pharmacy is all fluorescent lights, too many things on the shelves, and an assault of bright colors everywhere. I keep it together fairly well as I pick out my bottles of personal care products, but as we head to the checkout, I accidentally walk through the Christmas aisle. The shelves are lined with gingerbread house kits, candy canes, and boxes of cheap chocolates. I don’t truly want any of them, but they’re the first food of this kind I’ve seen in months of intense deprivation. My chest gets tight and palms start to sweat at the sight, and I have to fight down the starved animal inside of me that wants to tear the packages off the shelves and rip into them with my teeth.
“You have to get me out of here,” I tell Jessie, turning my face away from the junk food.
I don’t ask to be taken to town again.
For the next several days, the hotel suite is my entire world. It’s clear that I’m not yet ready to be exposed to modern society. I feel like my skin is made of cellophane, like I’m totally exposed and vulnerable and every nerve ending is raw. I’m utterly fragile—physically and emotionally—needing to rest after walking from the bedroom to the bathroom and crying at the drop of a hat. I miss the peninsula fiercely but also know I couldn’t make it there in this state. Now that I have them again, I can’t imagine leaving food and warmth any time soon—but I also have no desire to let the rest of the world back in. Adjusting to the reality of these three small rooms is plenty, and rather than feeling trapped in them, I feel secure in my little bubble.
My life revolves around the small plate of snacks Jessie brings me every couple of hours, and Ben monitors me daily, taking my weight and vitals and closely tracking my heartbeat and digestion. Am I pooping? When and how much? Too much? Too little? Too soft? Too hard?
I don’t realize at the time that these aren’t just routine questions, they are incredibly important in understanding how my body is handling the return to eating. Digestive issues are common and potentially dangerous for people readjusting to food after starvation. Watching for and understanding these indicators could make the difference between healing, or ending up back at the hospital.
Water weight comes on quickly, but I still have so little muscle mass that I can’t sit comfortably. I feel like Steve Martin from The Jerk, dragging a pen and notebook, a fuzzy sweater, and a fluffy bed pillow to sit on, whenever I leave the bedroom.
At first, I get only puréed vegetables and bone broth, but every day Jessie adds a little more substance and a little more variety to my diet. The first time she hands me a plate of real, solid food, I burst into tears. They aren’t tears of sadness, nor even of joy or gratitude—which would be appropriate. It’s simply utter overwhelm and confounded disbelief. All this food? For me? And I didn’t have to do anything but sit here to get it?
Even though it’s nowhere near as much food as my ravenous body is telling me to eat, it is still the most stunning display of abundance I can imagine. And to think there’s a whole world of people, just outside the hotel room door, who have all this and more, several times a day, and never realize that they’re blessed beyond the wildest dreams of their own, famine-honed ancestors.
Making ceremony of every meal feels vital. Jessie brings me a candle to make the room feel homey, and every time she brings me a plate, even a small snack, I turn the lights down, light the candle, and sit just looking at the food for a moment before I make the ancestor plate.
Eventually, I graduate to being able to self-administer a few select snacks. As it’s so few calories and almost no carbohydrates, I get two tiny cans of V8 juice daily—two whole cans! Rather than drink it all at once, I heat it in a bowl in the microwave and eat my “soup” by slow, careful spoonfuls, making a feast of those five tablespoons.
With so much light and warmth and whole days to fill, I take the opportunity to explore the foreign universe my body has become. My muscles are defined and ropey, the veins protruding and wrapping around my limbs like thin snakes. I can almost see the individual muscle fibers under my thin skin when I flex. I’m utterly fascinated by the strange person looking back at me in the mirror. Who is this wayward woman, and what has she done to herself? Every time I stare into her eyes they well up with tears—sometimes loving compassion for all she has gone through, sometimes sadness at the state of her, and sometimes just shock and disbelief as I come to grips with the fact that this isn’t a stranger in the mirror, it’s me. Finally, as I put on water weight and some of the empty hollows in my face fill back out, I begin to recognize my own features again, though I’m still gaunt.
To think, I was socialized to be ashamed of carrying “too much weight,” and of the round curves of my strong, healthy body. I feel infuriated at the society that conditioned me to judge myself so harshly back then. I was a good deal heavier in my youth than in my thirties and forties, and after spending a lot of my twenties wishing I was more slender, I would give anything to have that beautiful, round body back now. Then I realize that taking issue with this body is no different than taking issue with that one—neither attitude is gentle or loving. I look myself square in the face.
“You are beautiful,” I tell the emaciated woman in the mirror. “You are absolutely perfect, exactly as you are.” And the amazing thing is, I believe it. One hundred percent.
“I love you, Woniya,” I tell myself. “And I’ll always have your back, from here on out.”
73
Seeing the Wolf
My portion sizes increase daily, and slowly, the weight trickles back onto my frame—until I can bathe and sit almost comfortably without extra padding. I think about food every second of every day. Even as it sinks in that eating daily is something I can rely on again, I remain obsessed. I am like one of Pavlov’s dogs, my stomach growling and rumbling as the clock ticks down toward my snack time. Every minute that passes as I wait for it to arrive is excruciating, and I lick the plate after every meal, never wasting a single crumb or calorie.
I can’t wrap my brain around why being hungry now, when I know I have food coming, is infinitely harder than actual starvation was. I made that small pemmican ration last for months, but now I’m shocked at my lack of self-control. It’s one thing going without when you’re alone and have limited options. It’s quite another when you’re surrounded by well-fed people who have autonomy over their choices, while you, after just experiencing more freedom than you’ve ever known, currently have none.
As hard as it is, I know it’s important and I’m grateful for the support. The transition from an all-wild diet to a modern diet would be difficult for anyone, and that’s if they had been eating adequate calories of wild foods. With the level of starvation I was operating under, eating whatever my body tells me it wants right now, and in the mountainous proportions I dream of, could do serious, long-term harm to my system. Everything in the refeeding program, from the contents to the amounts, has been determined by a nutritionist working in conjunction with a doctor, and oriented toward my health and well-being.
Eventually, about a week into my refeeding program, a day comes when I can look at a full plate of food without crying over it. It feels like a loss, not a victory. I don’t want to lose the sense of magic that comes with food. I don’t want to eat a meal without feeling it pulse with life and hearing its calories singing to me. But it wouldn’t be sustainable to stay in transcendental realms forever, so eventually the mundane seeps back in through the cracks, even though the memory of what it is to be so raw and transformed will live with me forever.
Though I don’t relish the idea of going anywhere, eventually they fly me back to the production base camp in the wilderness to continue my recovery. I’m eager to be reunited with the gear that I left behind when they flew me to Yellowknife for my hospital visit, especially my willow basket of cranberries, as I miss the wild foods my system is most accustomed to. And yet, though they eventually became delicious to me on the peninsula, I can’t even swallow them now. They’re so saturated with smoke that it’s all I can taste, and they trigger my gag reflex. Apparently, I was so well smoked out there myself that I didn’t taste it.
